António Guterres of Portugal is the UN Secretary General for a five-year term starting 1 January 2017. He will be the ninth Secretary General of the UN.
Guterres, at 67, will become the second-oldest person to hold the office (Boutros Boutros-Ghali was 70 when he became U.N. Secretary-General).
The outgoing UN Secretary General, Ban-ki-moon, and António Guterres.
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Mr. Guterres, was Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002. An engineer by trade, Mr Guterres first entered into politics in 1976 in Portugal’s first democratic election after the “Carnation revolution” that ended five decades of dictatorship.
Mr. Guterres was the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees from June 2005 to December 2015. Mr Guterres led the agency through some of the world’s worst refugee crises, including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq.
Recalling his visits to war zones and refugee camps during his tenure as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Mr. Guterres shared how he had witnessed first-hand the suffering of the most vulnerable people on earth. “What has made us immune to the plight of those most socially and economically underprivileged?” he asked.